This edited volume examines how transnational English language assessment practices are envisioned, enacted, and justified by different stakeholders, including students, teachers, and universities in different geographical contexts, and what would be the multi-level consequences of such practices. Bringing together diverse perspectives from across the Global South and Global North, the book argues that the field of English language assessment has always been transnational, despite an absence of a research that explicitly examines English language assessment practices in relation to transnationalism. The contribution of this volume lies in filling in this critical scholarly gap. Through a wide set of epistemological, theoretical, and pedagogical interventions along with methodological orientations and analytical frameworks, the chapter authors question the social, economic, political, linguistic, and pedagogical consequences of transnational English language assessment practices in higher education (HE) settings and contexts. Offering fresh perspectives on English language assessment practices in relation to transnationalism, this book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of applied linguistics, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and language assessment more broadly.

This book addresses issues surrounding writing centers in the Arabian Gulf region. Including a foreword by Professor Ken Hyland, it brings together a number of thought-provoking chapters on the history, concept, and ground realities coupled with critical comparative discussions of writing centres in the region. The book begins by offering critical historical accounts of writing centers in the Gulf countries, before moving onto empirical research and reports on pedagogical practices that vividly capture the on-the-ground realities faced and experienced by different actors. These accounts serve to highlight how the writing centers vary between countries, as well as how they differ from the more well-known writing centers in the US and the UK. Finally, the book explores what sort of commonalities and differences the current trend of writing centres is producing within and between the six countries of the Arabian Gulf. This book will be highly relevant to those involved with writing centres along with directors, policymakers, researchers and teacher educators in the fields of Education and Sociology, particularly those with an interest in the Arabian Gulf area.

This edited volume contributes a novel understanding of the past, present and future of higher education across the six countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Against the backdrop of intense political, ideological and epistemological disruptions across the Arabian Gulf Region over the last two decades, this volume adopts critical comparative perspectives in order to chart the history, present-day and future realities of higher education in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. By focusing on dynamics relating to neoliberalism, and using the notions of 'tensionality' and 'locality' to situate topics such as curricula, policies, practices, the volume engages with current discourses, controversies and themes such as the internationalization and marketization of higher education in these countries. In doing so, the book offers a theoretical framework to enable greater understanding of the contemporary functioning of higher education in the Arabian Gulf Region. This text will benefit scholars, academics and students in the fields of higher education and international and comparative education more broadly. Those involved with educational policy and politics, and Middle Eastern studies in general, will also benefit from this volume.

This book embarks on an ever-expanding array of language, academic mobility, neoliberalism, and accompanying rich scholarly debates. It examines the ways in which international English language teachers in Saudi Arabia's higher education system position themselves, negotiate, interact, adjust, make sense of their classroom dynamics, and validate their senses of selves and pedagogies in their day-to-day (dis)engagement with their institutions and encounters at work. Informed by rich empirical data from a multi-year, multi-site project in addition to other qualitative studies, the book reveals on-the-ground complexities involving speaker status, language, ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, sociocultural factors, emotion labour, work dynamic and professionalism. It promotes thinking beyond normative ideologies on marginalisation, the native and non-native speaker dichotomy, linguistic, racial, religious and ethnic (inter)relations, and translanguaging pedagogies, while also offering new material for original theorisation in multi-Englishes multilingualism, local-trusting-local and the limits of negotiability.

This book embarks on an ever-expanding array of language, academic mobility, neoliberalism, and accompanying rich scholarly debates. It examines the ways in which international English language teachers in Saudi Arabia's higher education system position themselves, negotiate, interact, adjust, make sense of their classroom dynamics, and validate their senses of selves and pedagogies in their day-to-day (dis)engagement with their institutions and encounters at work. Informed by rich empirical data from a multi-year, multi-site project in addition to other qualitative studies, the book reveals on-the-ground complexities involving speaker status, language, ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, sociocultural factors, emotion labour, work dynamic and professionalism. It promotes thinking beyond normative ideologies on marginalisation, the native and non-native speaker dichotomy, linguistic, racial, religious and ethnic (inter)relations, and translanguaging pedagogies, while also offering new material for original theorisation in multi-Englishes multilingualism, local-trusting-local and the limits of negotiability.